The Parasol Flower Read online

“I—no—I think not, actually,” she stumbles. “Not for the time being.”

  “And you’ll appreciate that I need extra funds.”

  Before she can speak, he adds, “For the hunting party.”

  “Oh! I thought…”

  He thrusts the linen wallet toward her.

  “Thank you,” she says automatically.

  The colonel glances skeptically at her parcel of letters. “The new amount will be plenty for the household necessities. Food, cleaning supplies...” He returns behind his desk, his hands sliding toward each other over the back of the chair, coming closer and closer together. Throttling the tepid air. “…a lady’s necessities. Buy yourself a new pair of gloves, why don’t you.”

  Hannah tucks the wallet and the stack of letters under her arm, resisting the temptation to look down at her outfit.

  In the street, she discreetly unbuttons the wallet and counts the Straits dollars as the colonel’s voice drones on in her head, listing necessities. “A new pair of gloves, why don’t you,” she mimics. Gloves! She’s given up gloves. It was only out here, thirty thousand miles from civilization, that she’d worn them in the first place.

  The amount he’s given her is less than half of what she normally receives.

  She walks to the postal office, doing sums in her head. Making plans. And walks home, still dueling with the idiocies of life. Until that day it had not seemed to her that the colonel was on her side. But he had been. She’d taken for granted his generosity and his lenience.

  Four

  I made arrangements with Daphne and Bob Plewett over email. Their messages always included a signature line with both names:

  Cheerio,

  Daphne and Bob

  Take care of yourself!

  Daphne and Bob

  Love,

  Daphne and Bob

  So I was never quite sure which one of them wrote any given email. I liked to imagine it was both of them, sitting side by side at their computer keyboard as if they were playing a piano duet.

  The Plewetts lived in a place called Frimley, a former village cum suburb of London. It was suggested I take the train from Waterloo Station on the South Western rail line to Farnborough. There was a station at Frimley itself, but making it there required changing lines and it was no trouble, they assured me, to pick me up from the Farnborough main platform.

  We have white hair and a red Fiat.

  See you shortly,

  Daphne and Bob

  In mid-December I traveled to London by Eurostar, racing along under the ocean, periodically reminding myself that the odds of the structure collapsing and all of us drowning in the rough waters of the English Channel were probably astronomical. In the three months or so since I’d opened The Descent, my research into E.W. and the parasol flower had essentially petered out, and, as far as I knew, I was leaving it behind for good. Nothing was coming up on Google. I’d returned twice more to Richelieu to look at The Descent, scouring the front matter and the index and examining the other illustrations.

  From my research into book illustration I’d learned that etchings and engravings were completed by a handful of specialists hired to work from original pieces of art, copying the artist’s style and subject as best as possible, and transferring it into the print context. That meant E.W. was likely not the creator of The Parasol Flower, but rather more like a translator. Indeed, I noted many of the other botanicals for the book had been engraved by E.W. None of those seemed quite as excellent to me.

  Nor were they fantastical. E.W.’s other drawings had matching text; they did their job as illustrations. For instance, the chapter in which The Parasol Flower was embedded, “Wildflowers,” had a section on another huge specimen, the Rafflesia plant (Rafflesia arnoldii), whose meaty blossoms could span a yard in diameter. But these petals were spiny, oozed fluids, and stank like decaying offal.

  It must be a joke, I thought. The parasol flower! Yet who would insert a joke in their magnum opus?

  It occurred to me that something like three quarters of the planet’s species remained undiscovered. That was the tragedy of habitat destruction, wasn’t it, that life like this could vanish without anyone ever realizing it existed? Maybe these Peterborough scientists simply hadn’t known how to categorize this particular plant, or what to make of it in an evolutionary sense. Or perhaps the illustration had been added at the last minute, after the text had been finalized.

  When I looked up “Victorian botanical art,” I had been surprised to discover many of the artists were women. The idea that the parasol flower had been painted by a woman piqued my interest. Flowers were deemed a suitably feminine subject matter, of course. And one that you named after a parasol, that quintessentially feminine accessory, that veil of modesty…yet you painted it so big and so bold, dripping with sweaty jungle vapours…? Well, it was a slap in the face, wasn’t it? An enchanting, well-placed slap in the face.

  Having completed my dissertation research and writing for the day, I often laced up my running shoes and jogged a loop along the canal, over the Seine, and now—since the parasol flower—through the Jardin des Plantes, with its bulging stands of perennials and verdant patches of lawn between trails of crushed stone. I half-expected to turn down a little-known path, tucked away somewhere on the rambling grounds of the old gardens, and find a parasol flower blooming. I could almost smell it, like lemon gelato.

  On some days I didn’t work at all. I don’t mean the days I spent hiding in bed. Other days, when I took a little sketchpad and went to art museums and art galleries—Pompidou, d’Orsay, Montmartre, the Louvre, MAMVP, the Rodin museum—admittedly unlikely to have any nineteenth-century botanical paintings, but still a joy. At first I looked for The Parasol Flower, the painting that I guessed was hiding behind the etching in The Descent. I looked for Victorian botanical art, art of Malaysia, art by women. After a while, I simply looked. I could sit for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes before a painting, as eddies of spectators came and went. I loved people’s inane conversations, their impatience, their petty bickering over hotel tax and souvenirs and cuts of steak, and how all of this fell away as they moved into a painting’s orbit and lapsed into silent communion.

  Of course, inevitably, I would arrive home to my studio apartment, with its sprawling piles of paperwork, flowcharts mounted on each wall, and chastise myself for caring about anything but the dissertation. The rumor that Cavanaugh was heading to Loyola had turned out to be true. It seemed that he wasn’t even waiting until the end of the academic year, which immediately made me wonder if his reasons were more personal than professional. My ass, with Kenneth’s hands all over it. I thought, though it hadn’t been stroked or slapped in years, that my ass was quite as good as it had ever had been, quite as good as anybody else’s. I ought, perhaps, to have contacted our department Chair to let him know I was still alive and working. But this seemed a facile message to send. I wasn’t sure the man particularly cared. And once I told him Kenneth Cavanaugh was my advisor, the Chair would quite reasonably tell me to contact Kenneth Cavanaugh directly. Wouldn’t he? I was unsure how close the two colleagues were, or who might have said what to whom. In any case, what did I really want at this point? A new advisor to approve my distinctly Cavanaugh-esque prospectus? A way to follow Cavanaugh to Loyola and finish my degree there? Virtually, that was to say. I would no more have to go to Chicago than I had to go anywhere.

  As the train hurtled toward London, I was working my way through an anthology on “reconceptualizing power.” A foreboding feeling had lodged in me that Daphne and Bob were the sort of people who couldn’t abide excessive education. Still, I reasoned, I was unobjectionable in person. My mother’s Christmas cards over the years would dispose them to like me. I only hoped that at Christmas the Plewett’s went for roast turkey with the trimmings rather than blood sausage or pies filled with kidneys.

  At Waterloo station, I ma
de my way through the terminal and onto the correct commuter train dragging my cheap, wheel-less luggage. Block after block of brick buildings slid past me and I fell into the comatose state you arrive at when traveling, sometimes before you’ve reached the destination. I must have looked like a zombie to my hosts. When they spotted me rounding the small fence at the end of the Farnborough platform, their expressions registered something between disappointment and alarm. For my part, I had recognized the Plewetts immediately. They were the only ones standing in place rather than hustling to get somewhere; they were dressed for an outing.

  “Aren’t you good, dear, coming all this way,” Daphne said as I approached.

  She was a slightly stooped, slightly larger woman with loose salt-and-pepper curls and orthopaedic shoes. I imagined she would have been straight and slender in her youth, dark-haired and sharp-eyed. Her complexion remained lovely, though there seemed to be no appropriate way to compliment her on her skin. Bob was hunched in a similar curve to his wife’s. He had a slicked nest of white hair and a sallow complexion. I recalled his kidney disease.

  Bob extended a freckled hand and I shook it before realizing he’d been offering to take my case. “Oh, I’m totally fine with it,” I said.

  His eyes flicked to his wife’s. “Well then, I’ll open the boot.”

  Daphne held her hand out, and we shook awkwardly. She looked at me and said, not unkindly, “You’re exhausted.”

  “A bit,” I said.

  “First things first. You’re not to do any work while you’re with us.”

  We turned and started walking slowly toward Bob and the open trunk. I said, “I’m not sure if my mother told you…I’m…uh…writing my dissertation.”

  “Yes, of course she’s told me. That’s the work you’re not to do.”

  The spare bedroom they’d allotted for me had a little desk in one corner, billowy pink drapes, and textured wallpaper. Like the rest of their home, it smelled of apricot hand cream. The window looked out over a narrow backyard, closed for the season, beyond which I could see a wedge of frosted pasture. Frimley, from what I’d seen of it, was the sort of place where time stood still. Boutiques, charity shops, a brook, a park, peaky churches, and a nearby castle. If time had stopped, property values were in unceasing motion. Bob told me proudly their house had quintupled its value in the thirty years they’d lived there.

  I fell back onto the checkered pink bedspread and into a deep sleep.

  “It was your mother’s idea,” Daphne informed me later. They’d given me a grace period of a couple of days. She and Bob were spooning cherry yogurt into their mouths. Dessert.

  I rested my spoon. “What was my mother’s idea?”

  “Daphne,” Bob growled. He shook his head.

  “Well, she has no intention of listening to us,” Daphne said to him. “She’s up all hours zoned in on that laptop. She doesn’t do anything else. I think Lauren is right.”

  “She goes running,” Bob offered. “I think she’s taken a few photographs. She’s taken a liking to that coffee shop too, the one on Magnolia Street.”

  “What was my mother’s idea?” I demanded as politely as possible. “What is she right about?”

  Daphne said, “Let me put the kettle on first.”

  My mother had asked me to visit Daphne and Bob, not for their sakes, but for my own. This much I’d already figured out—perhaps even during that first deep sleep—though I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I felt guilty for worrying Mom. I felt angry, too, that she’d come to this conclusion. I was so unable to look after myself that an elderly pair of strangers had to be brought in as reinforcements. Or were the Plewetts her meager solution to my supposed loneliness? Well, I was lonely, okay, but not desperately lonely. And I failed to see how eating yogurt with pensioners was going to solve anything for me, even at Christmas. I sat in grim silence with Bob, waiting to hear the kettle whistle. I managed not to smack my forehead against the tabletop.

  Daphne returned carrying her tea tray. She set it down, poured us our milk, adjusted the tea cozy, and took her place at the head of the table.

  “My mother thinks I should give up on my PhD, doesn’t she?” I said.

  “Oh no. No, I don’t think she dares think that,” said Daphne, reaching over to shake the teapot. “It’s your dream, dear. Mothers these days seem to think it’s their duty is to promote their children’s dreams. Promote, promote, promote. Like cheerleaders.”

  “She’s as subtle as an elephant in drag,” Bob murmured to me.

  Daphne gave him a stern look. “She’s worried about your mental health, Nancy. For lack of a better word. Something’s happened to you, dear. Something’s going wrong.”

  “Well…” I didn’t know what to say. My mental life had been entirely overtaken by scholarly arguments. Truthfully, I was superior at decoding them, at critiquing them, unravelling what led to which and why. How could this excellence possibly be a problem? And yet there were those days spent sniffling in bed, days when the knots seemed too tight for me to ever untie them.

  “Your mother wants us to make sure that you take a break.” Daphne poured three mugs of orange pekoe then splashed milk in all three. “I’m the one who thinks you should quit entirely.”

  I slumped behind my mug, glaring at the toast rack that was still sitting at the center of the table. When I sipped, I might as well have been sipping pure adrenaline.

  “I’m afraid you’re just going to have to hear her out,” Bob said to me. “Just…just try to remember that she’s generally well-meaning.”

  “You don’t even know me!” I exploded at Daphne. “How on earth would you know what’s right for me? You use a toast rack, for god’s sake!”

  “Don’t know you? I’ve known your mother for fifty-odd years, dear. I knew her parents. I know what’s she’s been through and what she’s like; what kind of a house you and your brothers have grown up in; that she’s thrown you at me like some sort consolation prize instead of visiting us herself; that she thinks I’m going to just do her bidding, like everybody else does; that you’re neck-deep in something you can’t get out of, Nancy, and all she seems to care about is when you’re going to do her and your father proud. But you’re absolutely right, my dear, I don’t know everything. I don’t know why or how you’ve managed to spend five years in graduate school and have nothing to show for it.”

  “I don’t have nothing to show for it!”

  “My hunch is that they’re not doing you right, those people. Those professors. They should be helping you. They need to be guiding you. They need to be telling you, if it’s the case, that you’re not cut out for it.” Bob made a noise. “Well, they shouldn’t be leading her up the garden path, pretending she’s brilliant if she’s got nothing to—to contribute!”

  “Daph, I’m sure she’s got something to contribute,” he said softly.

  “Well, not everybody does, Bob. Despite what the papers will have you believe.” Daphne reached for my hand but fell short. “Nobody’s saying you have to be normal, dear. Sorry. Oh, that didn’t come out right.”

  “What she means,” Bob tried, “is that none of us care if you don’t want a nine-to-five job with a mortgage and two-point-five children. That’s not normal, anyhow.” He shot a look at his wife. “Not in this day and age.”

  I imagined the impression my mother’s letters and emails had given them. Single, having fled another boyfriend. (Mom not being aware that I had been cheating on said boyfriend with my married dissertation advisor.) Single, with no known friends, certainly not any good ones, so far from home/family. (Read: reality.) Single, with no church, no hobbies, no sense of style. Single, with ties only to virtual colleagues or strands of thought. Serious addiction to books.

  “You need a little fun, dear.”

  “Some balance,” added Bob.

  “Go to a party here and there,” Daphne said,
flinging her arms open. “Meet a nice man. Have some—”

  “I have…balance,” I shot back. “I have friends, real ones. From Wales. Who are studying phrenology. And…I’ve been going to art galleries lately.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Bob Plewett, nodding, avoiding his wife’s eyes.

  “And you know what? I’m fine with taking a break from my research.” A break, I thought to myself, would probably do my productivity good.

  “Yes, that’s all we’re saying,” Daphne said without irony. “Take a little break.”

  After that, we sat and drank tea and made small talk to prove that everything was still okay. A recent Sainsbury commercial had gone viral. It was a three-minute drama featuring soldiers in the trenches who’d enacted a ceasefire to trade stories, Sainsbury chocolates, and play a game of soccer.

  “Imagine that,” Daphne commented. “Those men had no idea it’d go viral, all these years later.”

  Five

  The rest of my December was cobbled together with crossword puzzles, television programming à la Bob and Daphne, and jogs through the nearby countryside. Sometimes I drove Bob to his dialysis appointments and sat with him while his blood was being scrubbed. Other days I walked to the little library branch in the village. There, I sat in the lounge to read detective novels from the “Page-Turners!” shelf. Although it might sound mundane, life outside and inside the Plewetts’ apricot-scented home felt inordinately special to me. Was it Frimley’s status in my life as an oasis? The fact I was no longer consuming scholarly arguments all day? The most ordinary of moments seemed richly textured with significance. I remember choking up over the last nub of soap as I showered; the bar had been shaped like a squirrel holding a nut.

  Daphne and Bob recommended Fulgham House. In an effort, perhaps, to introduce me to some national culture.

  “We’ve seen it many times,” Bob repeated as he wheeled into the car park.

  “It’s lovely done up at Christmastime,” said Daphne.